


Whipstitch

by Prosodi



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, Cowboys & Cowgirls, Embroidery, F/M, Gen, Sewing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-10-01 17:10:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20346634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prosodi/pseuds/Prosodi
Summary: Three women and their uses for needle and thread.Character studies of Abigail, Mary, and Molly. An examination of women’s work in 1899. Originally appeared in the Wolf's Head Red Dead Redemption fanzine.





	Whipstitch

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was originally written for and can be found in print in Wolf’s Head: a Red Dead Redemption Zine. The accompanying illustrations are original to this posting of the work. Special thank to leupagus for being such a bold and willing beta reader.

The only sounds when Jack falls from the back of the chuckwagon is the clang of a hanging pot banging on its hook and the too hard thump of his small boy body as it hits the ground. It doesn't sound like anything. Not really. It could easily be a sack of feed thrown down from a shoulder, or a barrel being rolled out and dropped down from the wagon. It could be any number of things in the low buzz of setting camp as tent poles are drawn from their lashing and waxed canvas comes unfolded between weather-rough hands. Somewhere, Abigail can hear Bill cursing and the repeating strike of steel on flint going _Click, click, click!_ as he fights the first fire out of spring-wet kindling.

"See, this is why you've got to keep some bark dry in your pocket. You have a little kindling with you inside your coat and you'll never be hard up."

"If you've got such an opinion on it, then why don't you do it yourself, you old--"

A bird is calling in the treetops. It smells like rain and small white flowers whose names she doesn't know.

The sound Jack makes after he hits the ground is the worst one Abigail's heard in her entire life. It goes on forever.

There's blood all over his face when she gets to him. He's white as the moon under it all, so pale that Abigail wants to shake him as she snatches him up from the ground. Pearson is there a split second after, though she thinks he'd been much closer at hand to start with so what the hell took him so long?

"Jesus! Is he all right?"

"Does he look all right?" she thinks, and screams something at him she doesn't recall once it's left her. Pearson snatches a bucket from the wagon and disappears from the margin of her attention.

"Jack, baby. You're okay. You're fine," she tells him. "Easy, easy. There's nothing wrong."

They sit in the dirt. There's a bucket of fresh water near to hand. She holds her son to her in a vice grip, his washed clean face buried against her. Hosea has little Jack's small ankles in his hands to keep him from putting his knee into her and there are two lamps being held close enough to make sweat prickle on her skin.

"What did I tell you about climbing all over things when no one's looking? What did I tell you?"

"He's fine, Abigail. He's just fine." Hosea sounds even and sure, as steady as the rise and fall of Strauss' hand and the glint of the needle as it pulls her boy's split scalp back together. "Why, I once saw his daddy fall from a balcony. He wasn't a genius after, but he hadn't exactly been one before either. Marston boys have hard heads, isn't that right Arthur?"

Above them, Arthur's grip on the lantern doesn't shift. He mumbles, "Something like that," from behind the hard shadow his arm casts over his face. Even in the dark, Abigail can recognize how fixed his expression has become. She feels a similar shape in her own bones all the time. It's like trying to live with a burning coal in a pocket, like a cut, like--

Jack flinches and whines for her under the needle's point. She'll memorize every stitch. She'll keep the number in her head and think of it when she's mending the torn knees of Jack's little pants. The vision of his split head will come to her as she's re-hemming shirts, and darning socks, and double stitching busted belt loops back onto trouser waists, and mending all the other things men love wearing to pieces. She'll think of it like she sometimes thinks about being a girl lying on the floor of an upstairs room in the cat house where she learned mostly everything, sewing buttons back on her dresses in the afternoon heat. She'll wet the thread with her tongue and slip it through the needle's eye, and she'll knot the thread like that Appalachian girl had taught her before leaving.

(Where to? Run away, they said, nevermind all the things the girl had left behind her. But Abigail supposes it's possible that was true. People are real stupid like that sometimes.)

_John Marston_, she thinks, _you better not ever come back. I'll hit harder than the ground did._

* * *

The St. Douglas Hotel sits in the middle of an Ohio railhead town. It is one in a string of utterly unremarkable places where Miss Mary Gillis has kept a room in the last six months, with its only favourable quality being a window facing west. In a few weeks, what view there is will be consumed by the second floor addition being framed out onto the mercantile behind the hotel, but for now the bare would-be rafters only serve as a picture frame for the setting sun. Or they would, were the view not blocked by the boy on the window ledge.

He sits it as he might an especially narrow pony, one muddy boot toe on the hotel room rug and the other stirring gold-brushed June air twenty feet from the ground below as his hands idly tie a length of cord into knots. His shirt is dirty. He smells like sweat and yellow summer grass. He's in the way of watching the sunset.

Mary doesn't mind it like she should.

"What kind of flower's that meant to be?" He nods to her needlepoint.

"_Meant_ to be?" Mary's hand stills. She puts the embroidery hoop down in her lap. "It's a rose."

"It's surely not."

"It is. I've got a guide from a magazine."

"Then your magazine's never seen one." He grins at her lopsided, shoulder settled back against the frame of the window he's so stubbornly inhabiting. His presence there chokes what little breeze there is. Even with the sun going down, the room's still warm. It'll probably be that way for hours yet and there's no denying that him clogging up the airflow doesn't help much, nevermind how much she does or doesn't like him.

She sniffs and resumes her work. There's not much light left to do this by, and she's never been one for stitching in lamplight. Not when there's no pressing reason to be done especially. "What do you think you know about flowers, Arthur Bright?"

"Nothing at all, I guess."

Which is more or less what she expected to hear. She pokes the needle through the stretched taut fabric and doesn't press him further, anticipating the quiet to last a few measured stitches and not much longer. Over the last few weeks, she's figured out he's not one for saying much, but that doesn't mean he isn't a talker. Seeing as he's climbed all this way up into her window, he must have something he thinks is worth saying.

Instead when Mary looks up, she finds he isn't chewing at the bit to run his mouth. Instead, he's looking out through the skeleton rafters and over shingled rooftops. The rail station sits out that way. She thinks he can probably see it from here. The whole place Daddy's brought them to is just five streets by four. In a day or two there will be two thousand head of cattle driven through it.

"Has your uncle found his buyer yet?"

Arthur tips his face to her. "Hm?"

"For when the beef comes in. His cut of them."

"Oh. Sure. I expect so."

It's awfully brief, but there's no real reason for him to be anything else. Daddy had refused Mr. Bright and Mr. Van Walker's offer nearly a full week ago. If she's honest with herself, she'd figured that to be the end of their shared company. Arthur and his sharp-eyed uncle and their partner would clear off in favor of other buyers and the most she might see of him would be across a street or distorted through a cafe window as they happened to go about their business in the same square two miles where she'd come to be awfully idle.

If she's _very_ honest with herself, she's glad that hasn't been true. It's nice to be treated as something other than an incidental accessory adjacent to her Daddy's business.

"'I expect so?' Why Mister Bright, I seem to recall you being fairly passionate about the whole business a few days ago." Passionate is maybe the wrong word. She amends to, "Knowledgeable at the very least."

A frustrated noise. He adjusts his hat on his head. "Nevermind that. What's the needlework for?"

Mary regards the hoop in her hands rather than the boy in her window. She's only just now starting in on the flowers and little embellishing curls. In the center of the frame they're meant to form sit the initials 'M' for Mary and 'G' for Gillis, followed by a blank space for--

Well, she doesn't know. For whatever comes after, she supposes.

"It's for my hope chest. Do you know what that is?"

"Now, Miss Gillis, I might look dumb as--"

She laughs. "Oh Arthur, I'm only teasing you." When he doesn't go on right away, she gives him an encouraging raised eyebrow.

(She can't say why she's so unkind to him sometimes. Only that she thinks she likes being argued with instead of at, or compared to having nothing said to her at all.)

"It's for your wedding things." And-- "I thought your mother was meant to put them together."

"Well, yes. I suppose she might." Mary pushes the needle through fabric and pulls it through from the far side, watching the pink thread be sucked down to form its arrow straight stitch. "Only she's dead. I could pay someone to do it for me, of course. Or I could trust a maid with it. But if I'm being square, then I think a hope chest ought to be filled with things made special by someone who cares for you. Seeing as Daddy can't keep a maid for longer than six months at a time, and so I hardly learn their names before they've gone, much less they mine-- Well, I may as well do it myself. And as I've been on a train going somewhere all summer, I have plenty of time for it."

It feels like the most she's said in one go in some time. She's not sure why she says most of it, and what she expects him to say - something smart mouthed about not knowing she was engaged and if so then why's she letting him sit in her window that she'll need to protest - isn't what he does.

"I'm sorry about your mother," he says. Mary doesn't know how it strikes her, only that is does.

"It was a long time ago."

"Mine died too. When I was just a boy."

"Then I'm sorry to hear it happened so recently."

"Oh," he scoffs and throws the piece of cord at her, half laughing. "Stop it. That's not a thing to joke about."

She hides her smile by bowing her head back over her needlepoint. He's right. It isn't. But they keep cracking grins anyway even though they don't say much to each other after. It isn't until later as he's dismounting from the window sill onto the ladder that it occurs to her--

"Oh! What is it you meant to come say to me?" Arthur stops. He goes sharp and still in the dying light and she thinks it's because she's guessed there's something he'd wanted to talk about. She tips her head like a question mark: _'Well?' _

"I'll tell you tomorrow."

Then he's gone. She doesn't see him again. Not in Ohio, anyway. In the morning the cattle come down through town and there is such a commotion of men and horses, of dust in the air and shouting, and a few men from the East coming to blows over some counterfeit bills of sale. When Mary finally returns to the hotel in the afternoon, the man at the desk stops her on the stairs.

"There's a packet for you, Miss Gillis."

She opens it while sitting on her bed, unwinding the coarse twine and unfolding the paper. Inside lays a staring black-eyed susan, thumbnail sized teardrops of blue false indigo, and a sprig of brilliant cardinal flowers brighter than blood. The note with them says:

> _Me and my 'uncles' have made our way from town ahead of the cattle on account of our business that I would rather not say much about but am fairly certain you will have some opinion on. But if they aren't as sour as I imagine they might be, I would not be disappointed to find that you might decide to write to me. If you care to, I've made some notes about how you could do it._

> _In the meantime, I am leaving you with better reference than a guide in a magazine. None of them are roses, but I believe these suit you better anyway. Good luck with it. _

> _Sincerely,_

> _Arthur Morgan._

* * *

Molly O'Shea, come along when I tell you to. Molly O'Shea, you get back to the table and finish your reading. Molly O'Shea, quit your whining and fetch water for the washing. Molly O'Shea, cover your hair. Molly O'Shea, I'll beat you myself if you speak to me like that again. Molly O'Shea, go help your Granny if you refuse to be good for me.

What that used to mean was _Go hover at your Granny's knee and learn a thing or two, for Jesus's sake._ And she would do it then because she was small and said her prayers and because it had seemed like it might one day matter she know. There her Gran would say to her: Here is a backstitch. We'll make seams with that, girl. Here is a topstitch to see this portion lays neat and flat. Here is a whipstitch to keep the edge from fraying.

Now, with the importance of learning much of anything faded, _Helping Granny_ means sitting on the warm hearthstone and watching as pieces of wood transform into collapsing black shapes in the fire. The old woman's hand may be as gnarled and knobby as a tree in winter, knuckles the size of glass marbles that ache as if breaking, but she's still better at threading a needle than her granddaughter is.

And why wouldn't she be? Grandmother O'Shea has done making and mending for longer than Molly has been alive, and she still does it now even though there's no good reason to and everyone knows so.

_'Dear Sir,'_ said the letter addressed to her father that Molly ought not to have read, but has, _'If you recall, we met last summer in Galway and spoke at some length of the state of the trapping business being conducted in the North Americas. Today, I write with good news from the West and a rich opportunity for any individual bold enough to make good on it--'_

_'Dear Sir,' _said the letter come some time after which had made her mother - who had been certain her husband was ruining them over the word of some drunkard - cry with relief, _'I am delighted to write of a considerable return upon your investment in the company, the details of which are enclosed in this letter.'_

_'Dear Sir,'_ writes their friend, _'I would be quite happy to send a man to greet you and your family when you arrive in New York.'_

So what is the point in needlework?

Molly sits there in that too-hot room with sweat prickling on the back of her neck, the quiet punctured by the crack of sparks and the rasp of her grandmother's hands over fabric, and she thinks the same thing her father must have when he first wired all their savings to his partner in America: _Why do the same fucking thing over and over when you could do anything else?_

Gran doesn't come with them when they go and neither do most of the things she's made. There's no room for all those home-stitched dresses and broadly patterned skirts in the pair of trunks they take across the sea with them. Once they arrive in America, Mr. O'Shea gets an advance from the bank. His daughter has a dress made with the finest catch-stitching she's ever seen, and she swears to herself that when she goes to Heaven that she will have hands gentle enough to make an angel jealous.

Her mother is right in a kind, of course. It turns out the business of furs out West is changing in the way it has already done back East and if Mr. O'Shea's friend had not begun the work as a drunk then he has certainly picked up the vice by then time they arrive. But by then they're committed to crumbling pieces still left. They take a room in an expensive house in the middle of the trading post turning town to give the business an air of legitimacy it evidently hasn't had for some months, and at night Molly draws a pin-neat shawl about her whose maker she's glad not to know.

Molly O'Shea, don't you believe the lie your father is telling those people. Don't you go thinking this will last. Molly O'Shea, you do what you're told. Molly O'Shea, you take off those fine new shoes; you've no business wearing such fine things like that. Molly O'Shea, don't you dare leave me alone out here. Molly O'Shea, fetch your needle and thread.

* * *

Husbands die and the things with their initials stitched into them are put away. There are small insects which will be born to make their homes in the floral embroidery of fine forgotten shawls. At the end of Summer, John Marston comes back to the Van der Linde gang with holes worn into nearly all his shirts.


End file.
